1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to gas turbine engine powered aircraft power and thermal management systems and, more specifically, to such systems for cooling components of the gas turbine engine and aircraft.
2. Background Information
In recent years, modern military aircraft designs such as for Lockheed F35 have included integrated power and cooling systems also referred to as power and thermal management systems.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,624,592 discloses a power and cooling management system configured to flexibly couple various adaptive modules to an integrated power and cooling unit to suit any aircraft platform is provided. The integrated power and cooling unit has a compressor(s), power turbine(s), cooling turbine(s) and integral starter generator(s) mounted to the shaft of the power and cooling turbine. The integrated power and cooling unit may be pneumatically and/or pneumatically coupled to an adaptive module that comprises an additional compressor and an additional turbine or electrically coupled to a fuel cell which provides the main power after entering the full operation mode. When the engine includes an integral starter generator mounted thereto, the integral starter generator of the integrated power and cooling unit is operative to receive electric power from the engine mounted generator. Alternatively, a motor/generator may be mounted to the shaft of the additional turbine of the adaptive module.
Other examples of integrated power and cooling systems discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,624,592 include U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,684,081, 4,494,372, 4,684,081, 4,503,666, 5,442,905, 5,490,645, 6,415,595, and 6,845,630. The inventors of U.S. Pat. No. 7,624,592 found that these designs were complex and wanted to reduce the complexity of the engine configuration and its integrated power and cooling systems.
Future military aircraft will have considerably more electronics (for countermeasures, jamming, direct energy weapons, etc.) than what is used today. The future aircraft will need megawatt (MW) levels of cooling instead of kilowatt (KW) levels of cooling used today. Current thermal management systems do not supply such large amounts of cooling power. There is a need to provide cooling for on-demand heat loads combined with aircraft fuel tank heat sink storage. On-demand cooling means being able to supply short duration high cooling loads and low cooling load during the majority of the aircraft mission time. Bursts of high cooling loads or power are required during high powered flight and directed energy weapon operation.